America, we have a problem. It is mostly a problem of definitions. Defining words and what they mean. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has gone to Britain to badmouth the United States of America. She slammed U.S. efforts to secure the border and told the BBC that the immigration policies of President Donald J. Trump “makes it very hard for America to tell Europeans what to do if we can’t figure out how to be more humane ourselves.”

One would expect more from a former Secretary of State. Sorry, Mrs. Albright, We cannot open the borders of the country to everyone who might wish to come. Europe is slowly coming to the same realization. The problem is with words ( and the understanding of words) like “humane,””empathy.” “compassion,” “charity,” “mercy.” Above all, it is a misunderstanding of radical Islam. It is easy to babble on about generosity and fellow-feeling, but laws require specifics.

It is not “compassionate” to suggest that we should open the borders to all the 7+ billion people of the world. Oh, you didn’t mean that? Then specifically how many do you think we can admit without creating hardship and death for current American citizens? Potential immigrants are not all nice people. The 1st duty of the federal government is to protect American citizens.

Angela Merkel is backtracking as fast as she can to save her administration, by putting some restriction on immigration. She agreed to set up “transit camps for migrants at the border, and to eventually turn some of them away,” Now she’s got to convince Austria and Hungary who “must agree to take back some of the migrants in order to satisfy the Bavarian partners in her own government.”

Observers (like us) read the news of rapes, murders, child sexual grooming, attacks on citizens, bombs and knife attacks, and acknowledge that it means the Suicide of Europe. Under current situations, Europe will be Islamic not too far in the future.

We are confronted with a religion —Islam—that in its purest form, demands that its adherents kill anyone who does not submit. Did you miss the pictures of our journalists being beheaded? Apparently Kathy Griffin did. Protesters in Iran risk being put to death for their apostasy. Islam— demands that homosexuals be thrown to their death from tall buildings or off cliffs, or anyone that seems to not be obedient. They are also fond of stoning unbelievers or those who have strayed in some way.

America was settled by immigrants fleeing the religious wars of Europe, and searching for somewhere where they could have freedom of religion. Even today our Supreme Court is regularly deciding questions about freedom of religion. Democrats are expressing horror at the possibility that a potential judicial nominee might be Catholic and not favor abortion.

This is a different question than the simple idea of freedom of religion, and nobody wants to face up to hard questions. There are people like Ayan Hirsi Ali who have escaped (literally) from Islam. There are many people who have explained the Moslem religion, and too many who parrot the phrase “Islam is a religion of Peace” without understanding. Our Reformation was so long ago (1517-1648) that the word is now being used for a new line of women’s clothes. Cute. And the office of Secretary of State is used to get former opponents out of the way.

There are bits of good news from Europe, from Austria in particular. Chancellor Sebastien Kurz, the guy our own German ambassador recently called a rockstar when suggesting that there is something of a more conservative resurgence in Europe. Well, of course that had the lefty news media having fits. An insult to Chancellor Merkel, interfering in elections. Ambassador Grenell said that he wanted “to empower other conservatives throughout Europe and that there is a groundswell of conservative policies that are taking hold because of the failed policies of the left.”

The bureaucrats of Europe are not happy with us. See the Paris Climate agreement, which would have accomplished nothing whatsoever for the climate, except to transfer large amounts of American taxpayers’ money to developing African states and help to keep their migrants at home. We’re also demanding that the Europeans keep up with their NATO and military readiness obligations, and they don’t want to.

Austrian Chancellor Kurz will be closing more than half a dozen mosques and ejecting dozens of Imams suspected of supporting radical theology, along with the disbanding of other Islamic organizations. They may expel up to 60 Turkish-funded imams and their families, and a hardline Turkish nationalist mosque in Vienna.

Ankara denounced the move, and Turkey’s presidential spokesman tweeted that ‘Austria’s decision to close down seven mosques and deport imams with a lame excuse is a reflection of the anti-Islam, racist and discriminatory populist wave in this country.’

Austria is a country of 8.8 million people with roughly 600,000 people of Turkish origin, including 117,000 Turkish nationals. Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has shown extensive signs of wanting to become another Middle Eastern dictator or tyrant, and referred to Kurz as “this immoral chancellor.” In the last year’s elections, both coalition parties called for tougher immigration controls, quick deportation of asylum-seekers whose requests are denied and a crackdown on radical Islam. Sounds a little familiar. The bureaucrats may want to keep doing business as usual, but the people are getting restless. Sebastien Kurz is a fresh voice, and a determined one.

Every year, the remembrance of D-Day grows a little weaker, as it fades into history. A young man of 18 on June 6, 1944 would now be 92. There are not many left, and now it is only those who were children then who remember events as they were happening. I always post something about the anniversary, but many years it is just a repost of what I wrote a previous year. You can access them all by entering “D-Day” in the blank over Bob Hope’s head in the sidebar. Last year’s post of a book review of “D-Day Through German Eyes” is interesting and the links still work.

“They All Hate Us, Right?” was a post in 2008 about the French reenacters. I don’t know if they are still doing it, but it’s interesting simply because it points out that it isn’t just the current media who don’t know what they are writing about, it’s been going on for a long time. Piper Millin’s story is a good one as well.

One of my favorite stories I don’t know if I ever wrote about, but it is some real evidence of our common humanity. It concerns the photo which all of us have probably seen many times of the GI in the water on D-Day, huddled behind a beach obstacle, trying to avoid the rifle fire, and looking terrified, but determined. There are hundreds of men all across the United States who claim to have been that guy. Don’t give me any of your “toxic masculinity” nonsense. Men are useful far, far beyond their ability to open jars and eliminate scary spiders.

Once again I want to urge you, if you have an interest in history or maybe more if you don’t, to buy and read Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars. Europe does seem, at present, to be slowly committing suicide. They are realizing that a good many of their migrants have no intention of assimilating and some of the countries are considering ways to block more migrants and if they can, to remove some who are already there. Here are a couple of brief excerpts:

The D-Day invasion of Normandy (Operation Overlord) was the largest combined land and sea operation conducted since the invasion of Greece by King Xerxes of Persia in spring 480 B.C. It dwarfed all of history’s star-crossed beach landings from Marathon to Gallipoli (April 1915). Normandy would serve as a model for large subsequent America seaborne operations from Iwo Jima (February 1945) and Okinawa (April 1945) to Inchon (September 1950). It made all prior iconic cross-Channel invasions in either direction—Caesar’s (55 BC), William the Conqueror’s (1066), Henry V’s (1415), or the 1809 British landing in Flanders—seem minor amphibious operations in comparison. …

Over 150,000 Allied troops landed the first day on five British, Canadian, and American assigned beaches, along with over twenty-five thousand airborne soldiers dropped behind German lines. Unlike possible spots in the Cotentin Peninsula or at Calais, the Allies believed that landings in Normandy would pose far more of a surprise, given the somewhat greater distance from Britain. More important, the expansive geography of the Normandy beaches would not box in the invading Allied armies on a confined peninsula or allow the Germans to focus on a narrow front. Unlike the prior landings in Sicily and Italy, Operation Overlord had been carefully planned for over a year, drawing on the lessons from the Allies past amphibious problems at Dieppe, Sicily, Salerno and Anzio. New inventions and weapons were crafted for the invasion, from portable “Mulberry ” harbors to PLUTO (“pipelines under the ocean”) fuel lines laid under the English Channel and to Sherman and Churchill tanks modified to uncover mines, cut barbed wire, provide pathways over the soft beaches, and bridge obstacles.

At this point I always have a flashback to the Robin Hood movie with Russell Crowe, when history deficient Hollywood had Robin headed for the beaches to prevent the landing of Henry V, and Henry’s troops were landing in Higgins Boats made out of driftwood, with the iconic front panel that drops down to allow the troops to run (or swim) for the beach. There were Higgins boats in the Lord of the Rings trilogy as well, but fortunately not so obvious. Andrew Jackson Higgins’ little plywood landing crafts played a big part in winning the war.

I have no idea how many books have been written on World War II. Many of them important, but Victor Davis Hanson has explained it. I gave my oldest son, who is really interested in the war, and has toured the battlefields in Europe,The Second World Wars for Christmas. He usually mutters about the somewhat conservative books I give him, but he made a special point of thanking me for it. He said it has made it all make sense, and he loved the book. So there are glimmerings of hope.

If you have not yet ordered the book, you’ll be glad that you did. The preface explains the title, and why Victor Davis Hanson was the correct one to tell that story. Memorial Day would be a good time to indulge.

I am troubled by serious essays about the suicide of Europe, but then I’m troubled by the European Union, by Brussels, and most of all by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s foolish invitation to the migrants of the world. When I worry about the future, I worry about Europe, as you have probably noticed. One country after another reports (or avoids reporting) about their problems with Moslem migrants. Burned cars, riots, rapes, murders, but what is the most troubling seems to be a refusal to face and deal with reality, and a reluctance to let anyone else know about the problems they face.

Fortunately, Victor Davis Hanson is often there to clarify the problems. He writes for the Hoover Institution about “The Great German Meltdown“

Every 20 to 50 years in Germany, things start unraveling. Germans feel aggrieved. Ideas and movements gyrate wildly between far left and far right extremes. And the Germans finally find consensus in a sense of victimhood paradoxically expressed as national chauvinism. Germany’s neighbors in 1870, 1914, 1939—and increasingly in the present—usually bear the brunt of this national meltdown.

Germany is supposed to be the economic powerhouse of Europe, its financial leader, and its trusted and responsible political center. Often it plays those roles superbly. But recently, it’s been cracking up—in a way that is hauntingly familiar to its European neighbors. On mass immigration, it is beginning to terrify the nearby nations of Eastern Europe. On Brexit, it bullies the British. On finance, it alienates the southern Europeans. On Russia, it irks the Baltic States and makes the Scandinavians uneasy by doing business with the Russian energy interests. And on all matters American, it increasingly seems incensed.

Certainly, Germany has done some unbelievably strange things in the last ten years. In a fit of fear, after the Japanese Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdown in 2011, and in a huff about climate change, Berlin more or less abruptly junked traditionally generated electrical power and opted for inefficient and unreliable “green” renewable wind and solar—despite the less than Mediterranean nature of its climate and warnings of the financial downside. The result is that electricity costs have climbed 50 percent in recent years and are among the most expensive in the developed world—and electricity itself is sometimes scarce. In response to shortfalls in power generation, the German energy industry for now is looking at solutions like coal-fired plants, buying nuclear-generated electricity from its neighbors, and cutting deals with Vladimir Putin for natural gas. In other words, Germany spiraled from the one extreme of green idealists to the other of dirty coal, while counting on others to export their electricity into Germany.

Oh do read the whole thing, and read the comments too. Here, for once, they are polite and thoughtful. Lots of us are concerned. But the Europeans don’t seem to have a very clear view of their own problems, or they don’t want to admit that they have problems, or they refuse to face the problems themselves. I don’t know, but suggesting that migrants be trained as truck drivers seems so completely wacko that I simply do not understand. Perhaps the American media seems just as strange to the Europeans. They are very interested in our goings-on. The media has become a poor representation of events here, is the European media equally partisan and politicized? Do we seem to them so unaware of our own problems?

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Europe’s borders to over one million Middle Eastern and African immigrants in 2015, it became clear that the vast majority of them were unskilled. She pushed a program of training the migrants to be truck drivers.

In 2016, two prominent German driving associations rejected Merkel’ suggestions. Three months later a Libyan failed asylum seeker named Anis Amri stole an articulated lorry, killed the Polish driver and drove it into a Berlin Christmas Market—killing eleven and injuring more than 50 people.

Economics Minister Buchholz, from the libertarian Free Democrats (FDP), said: “With this imaginative and praiseworthy initiative, the Logistics Organisation and the German Red Cross are building a bridge between the integration of refugees and the fight against the shortage of skilled workers.”

The programme heads maintain that refugees will be screened for residency rights and work permits as well as for minimum language skills; however, figures released this week revealed 80 per cent of Germans distrust the government’s screening after the Bremen immigration office was found to have wrongly granted 1,200 migrants refugee status.

Before the Christmas Market attack, a Tunisian-born French resident drove a 19 ton cargo truck into a crowd of people celebrating Bastille Day on July 14th, 2016, killing 86 people and injuring 400.

On April 7th, in 2017, a rejected Uzbek asylum seeker drove into a shopping area of pedestrians in Stockholm, Sweden, killing 5 and injuring 14 others.

More than half of the terror plots in Germany have involved asylum seekers or migrants since 2014 and the beginning of the migrant crisis.

A recent poll has found that 80% (79.9%) of Germans distrust the rulings of the Government Migration Agency. Possibly something to do with the dandy idea of building a bridge between the integration of refugees and the fight against the shortage of skilled workers. And possibly because the Bremen immigration office was found to have incorrectly granted 1,200 migrants refugee status. Applicants will be screened for residency rights and work permits, and for language skills. Nothing was mentioned about screening for terrorist impulses.

Today is officially President’s Day, in lieu of having to celebrate a birthday for each of the presidents, which is just silly. The people were delighted to have another 3-day weekend, and the unions could offer that to the people from whom they demand dues as a gift from them, or something like that. I’m an anti-President’s Day crank, and firmly believe that we should celebrate only Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays, unless someone turns out to be spectacular in some way, which is unlikely.

We’ve had a few very good presidents, and a lot of mediocre ones and a few really unfortunate ones. Presidents are merely normal human beings with ordinary human failings, who somewhere along the line got the bug to run for the presidency. Some, once infected, never get over it, like Harold Stassen and Hillary.

Today, as a few have reminded us, is a day that should live in infamy. It’s the seventy-sixth anniversary of the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February, 1942, which rounded up about 120,000 American immigrants and American citizens of Japanese ancestry and sent them off to internment camps.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, people were afraid of an attack on the West Coast. Many regarded the Japanese-American population of California as a threat. They were forcibly removed to ten “internment” camps. Most lost their homes and businesses. Immigration from Japan had been banned since 1924, and all Japanese immigrants were ineligible for citizenship.

Some people of German or Italian ancestry were also detained or interred, but most were already American citizens. Some were removed from coastal security areas, but authorities soon decided that Italians were not a problem. President Reagan made a public apology with the signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1998 which spoke to Japanese Americans and members of the Aleut community. President George H.W. Bush pledg es to “take a clear stand for justice and recognize that injustices were done to Japanese Americans during World War II.

Some people writing about this today have attempted to make a parallel with President Trump’s exclusion of refugees from Islamic states where terrorism is supported with the Japanese American internment, which is silly, but not surprising in the current atmosphere. The Left is currently in favor of open borders because new immigrants are inclined to vote for Democrats, because they favor more government assistance. The Left’s only interest is in power, more voters and a larger body-count for the next census in 2020 so they can dispose of the Electoral College.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is usually judged by academic historians to be one of our greatest presidents, presumably because he was president during World War II, and we won. He made a mess of the Depression with constant tinkering and it was far longer and more damaging than it would have been otherwise. And then there was Yalta.